CABLE TV NOTES

CABLE TV NOTES; BRAVO THRIVES ON CULTURE

Published: December 15, 1985

Marking a significant anniversary by presenting a festival of films by the director Michael Powell and the screenwriter Emeric Pressburger - whose collaborations include such winning works as ''The Red Shoes'' and ''Black Narcissus'' - will probably seem a lesser entry in the world of promotion. But the fact that Bravo turned to these films to begin its sixth year of operation this week is an indication that such seemingly uncommercial fare has a lively constituency on this very viable service.

For Bravo, what has kept things afloat for the past five years has been an evolving mix of cultural programming. Nowadays, a spokesman said, approximately 70 percent of the premium service's schedule is devoted to films, nearly all of which are either from abroad, from the fringes of American production or from times past. The remainder of the schedule is given over to the performing arts -jazz concerts, ballet, opera, modern dance and the like. From Woody Allen films to documentaries about Latin America to performances by the Pina Bausch dance troupe, the offerings range from the challenging to the downright esoteric.

Bravo has engaged a number of hosts - including the actors E. G. Marshall and Glenda Jackson and the singer Roberta Peters - to provide introductions and closing statements for most of the service's major presentations. A new contributor is the director Martin Scorsese, who is serving as host for the seven-week Powell and Pressburger retrospective. Mr. Scorsese will discuss the British team's influence on world cinema, as well as on his own work, such as the films ''Taxi Driver,'' ''New York, New York'' and the current ''After Hours.''

Today at 5 P.M., Mr. Scorsese will introduce Powell and Pressburger's ''Canterbury Tale,'' a warmly mystical retelling of Chaucer in which an American soldier and three Britons undergo psychological transformations while traveling to the hallowed English cathedral. Starring Eric Portman, Dennis Price and Kim Hunter, this 1948 film is here receiving its cable premiere.

Bravo is a survivor of the once ardent battle to bring culture to cable. In the early 1980's, four culture-heavy services - first Bravo, then ABC Arts, CBS Cable and the Entertainment Channel - came into being, but the latter three quickly withered, for a variety of reasons that all reduced to the rule of economics. Yet Bravo has prospered, albeit moderately. From 48,000 nationwide subscribers at the end of 1981, the service now boasts about 350,000. According to Robert Weisberg, Bravo's general manager, the viewers tend to be at the higher ends of the economic and educational spectrum, and to live in large cities, upscale suburbs or college communities. And, he added gratefully, Bravo expects to break into the black next year.

How has Bravo made a go of it? One answer is that the service has reversed its original intentions. Bravo was first envisioned as exclusively a performing-arts service, ''but within 10 months of our start-up, the three other cultural channels all came on,'' Mr. Weisberg said. ''Partly in response to that competitive situation, we began showing a few movies late in 1981 - by directors like Fellini, Truffaut, Godard and Kurosawa. This proved to be a success, and the quantity has gone up every year since.''

With greater quantity came greater diversity, Mr. Weisberg added, as Bravo went beyond the ''purist's approach'' to presenting great art films and moved into the work of lesser-known foreign directors, American independent productions and historically significant movies. Whereas 70 percent of Bravo's films were in foreign languages - presented dubbed or with subtitles - in 1982, 70 percent are now in English, in part because of what Mr. Weisberg described as ''a resurgence of production in England, Scotland, Australia and New Zealand.''

While Bravo's quantity of performing-arts programs has diminished in proportion to the increase in films, the service has stepped up its venture into original co-productions. One example is ''Jazz Counterpoint,'' a sporadic series of interviews and performances with leading jazz musicians - such as Teddy Wilson, Les McCann and John Lewis - that Bravo makes in conjunction with cable operators around the country.

As for the future, Mr. Weisberg expects Bravo to hold its course. ''We found a formula with a programming mix that our audience responds to,'' he noted. Although films cost more to lease than performing-arts fare, he said, both are relatively inexpensive, and since ''we don't have substantial sums of money available, we're able to maintain a workable budget.''

Nevertheless, the service hopes eventually to be branching out. Mr. Weisberg projected that Bravo will go round-the-clock within the next few years - it currently broadcasts about 12 hours a day - and it will become more extensively involved in original production. The service is currently looking into co-productions of theater pieces with several independent British television facilities, as well as with cable operators in the United States.

Tall Tales

What becomes a legend most? For ''Shelley Duvall's Tall Tales & Legends,'' the accouterments include star performers, leading directors, whimsical scripts, lots of original music, as much location shooting as the budget can cover and 60 minutes of running time. Miss Duvall is executive producer of the series, whose first installment, ''Annie Oakley,'' comes to Showtime Friday at 8 P.M.

A kind of natural successor to the actress's popular ''Faerie Tale Theater,'' the series offers playful adaptations of traditional stories centering on larger-than-life folk heroes. In ''Annie Oakley,'' for example, Jamie Lee Curtis protrays the prodigious sharpshooter who joined Buffalo Bill's renowned ''Wild West Show'' before going on to greater glories abroad. With music by Ry Cooder, the program was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Future chapters include a retelling of ''Johnny Appleseed'' that stars Martin Short (late of ''Saturday Night Live'') and a dramatization of ''Casey at the Bat'' with Elliott Gould, directed by David Steinberg - and with Howard Cosell reciting the title verse.

''Unlike 'Faerie Tale Theater,' which was made of stories that have been around for hundreds of years, here there may be 15 or 20 completely different versions of each tale,'' Miss Duvall said the other day, speaking by telephone from Los Angeles. ''They're probably related to some person who actually existed, but every storyteller has his own Paul Bunyan. We did a lot of library research and, for the most part, chose story lines that dealt with aspects of the person's life that are of legendary proportions. The good thing about tall tales is that you can invent without changing the basic elements.''

Miss Duvall also pointed out that ''Tales and Legends'' - of which six episodes have already been commissioned by Showtime - has a richer dose of ''action and adventure'' than her earlier series, as well as a more outrageous streak to its humor. ''I grew up in Texas with a lot of colorful people, and those stories just made you gape and laugh,'' she said. ''Pecos Bill rode a tornado around -I mean, what could be more amazing than that.''

But despite their overstated, even mythic elements, the stories must be rooted in a credible reality, Miss Duvall believes. ''When someone's telling you a tall tale, you're supposed to believe every word, whether it's true or not,'' she said. ''And that's what we're after - you know it just can't be, but you go with it, anyway.''

Channel Hopping

New comedy and operetta come to Arts and Entertainment this week: ''Alias Smith and Jones,'' whose 12 weekly installments begin this evening at 8, stars the British funnymen Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones, formerly of the popular BBC series ''Not the Nine O'Clock News,'' which inspired HBO's ''Not Necessarily the News.'' Produced by the BBC in 1984, the half-hour programs feature the boisterous duo in free-wheeling pastiches of satire and sketches . . . Friday evening at 8, a 1982 production of ''The Mikado'' by the Stratford Festival, Ontario, will be given its American premiere. Produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the three-hour realization of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic tale of love and scapegoating in the Japanese Imperial Court stars Eric Donkin, Marie Baron and Henry Ingram.